Sunday, December 22, 2013

I definitely had a lot of fun RE'ing PunkBuster. It was enlightening seeing the types of challenges Game Developers have to cope with to make their games fair. As expected, PunkBuster is totally doing it wrong. Building a system that is modifiable by an attacker will never be safe. Luckily, it appears there is now an alternative. Since the BattleField 4 release, a new kid has arrived on the block and they are doing anti-cheating the proper way. And what is that way? By monitoring actions and results *server side* using statistical and behavioral analysis. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend checking out Fair Fight's FAQ. So yeah soon cheating will be harder, provided GameBlock's implementation is sound and easy'ish to implement in games. So where does that leave me? Wanting to build my own game obviously.

Online game development is not easy, it requires a developer to be knowledgeable in a lot of very unique topics.(Of course in 99% of the cases, these topics would be covered by multiple people!)

Art & Design

Physics

Responsive interfaces

Combat & AI

Network Programming

Scaleability

Data structure and management

Security

I think what interests me the most of all of those above topics is Network Programming. Building a safe, fast, reliable and scaleable network protocol that can handle thousands of concurrent users is an extremely fascinating topic. So I think I will start with that and hope everything else just comes together (wishful thinking).